Fungal pathogens often carry dispensable chromosomes (DCs) that confer a selective advantage in adverse environments or during host infection but can be spontaneously lost under non-selective conditio...

The conservation of immune systems from prokaryotes to eukaryotes can guide discovery of immunity genes across the tree of life. Most studies to date have focused on metazoan systems, while the extent...

Bentham Lab, Centre for Programmable Biological Matter, Durham University. Structural biology and de novo protein design applied to host-pathogen interactions, plant immunity, and neglected tropical d...

Background During host colonization, fungal plant pathogens secrete effector-like proteins that alter host cell physiology and target plant-associated microbes. However, rapid evolution and low sequen...

To cause rice blast disease, the filamentous fungus Magnaporthe oryzae develops a specialised infection cell called an appressorium, which generates enormous turgor to breach the rice leaf cuticle. Al...

Abstract. Outbreak sequencing provides insight into the origin and evolutionary processes acting on emerging pathogens. Sequencing a historic multihost out

Croll lab at University of Neuchatel. The lab of Daniel Croll wants to understand how pathogens evolve to cause disease. For this, we mainly focus on major crop pathogens to unravel mechanisms of rapi...

Abstract. Dikaryotic rust fungi maintain two distinct haploid nuclei for most of their life cycle, making their large, repeat-rich genomes difficult to ass

Plants and animals respond to pathogen attack by mounting innate immune responses that require intracellular nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) proteins. These immune receptors detect pathog...

The blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae is the causal agent of the most serious disease of cultivated rice and an emerging threat to wheat production. Controlling blast diseases is therefore critical t...

Influential themed journal issues across the life sciences.

Fungal effectors may have evolved from ancient antimicrobials, shaping plant microbiota and immunity during infection.

This study introduces genome–host association (GHA), leveraging natural epidemics to map the genetic landscape of host adaptation in the pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici. Applied to 832 wheat fungal stra...

📢 Check out this checklist of crop wild relatives in Zimbabwe! 💡 Crop wild relatives are the untamed cousins of our cultivated crops. 📊 The checklist provides baseline data for crop improvement and...

Plants are exposed to a variety of devastating pathogens, causing significant yearly yield losses. In order to facilitate infections, plant pathogens …

Check out this new review highlighting advances in DNA-, RNA-, and chromatin-based technologies and how they are used to keep pace with the emerging threat

Abstract. Transposable elements (TEs) are found in nearly all eukaryotic genomes. Despite significant advances in the sequencing of genomes, TE resources r

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